Sony: PSN running costs are too high to keep it free on PS4

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The PS4 may be $100 cheaper than the Xbox One when it launches later this year, but using Sony’s console is going to be a little more expensive than the equivalent experience gaming on PS3. That’s because Sony has shifted online multiplayer to be a feature of a PlayStation Plus subscription rather than being a free service.

That means if you want to play against others online, you need a $50 per year Plus account. However, access to streaming services such as Netflix will remain a freely available feature of the console. But why did Sony choose to start charging for multiplayer?

According to Shuhei Yoshida, Sony’s Worldwide Studios boss, it simply came down to a matter of cost. Running the servers that power the PlayStation Network isn’t cheap, and continuing to offer multiplayer for free would have cost too much, to the point where Sony would have had to lower the quality of the service to compensate. I imagine that would mean fewer dedicated servers or locations around the world, leading to higher latency and a poorer overall experience.

By making this change Sony is embracing a paid model that Microsoft has been using for a while on Xbox 360. However, Sony isn’t putting a pay wall in front of third-party services and it already offers a PlayStation Plus account that includes a tremendous amount of value. By paying for access to multiplayer, you are going to gain access to those other benefits, too, e.g. new free games to download and play every month.

We’ve already looked at the true cost of the PS4 compared to Xbox One, and I doubt an extra $50 for a Plus account is going to make a big difference to gamer’s choice to purchase or not. As long as Sony continues to offer the value current Plus subscribers enjoy, it’s worth the subscription cost.